User blog:Jedd the Fighter/Regarding the Chronology Articles
Forums come and go – it's happened more than a few times throughout the history of Oberin. And now, there's a mountain of chronology entries with external links to a forum that no longer exists (see 432, 433, 438, and 439). At some point (preferably when I'm back to having a stable connection), I'll need to go through the chronology pages and fix the links. But I can't help but wonder: will I need to do it again if/when a new forum comes around? Nope. It's time we start making more use of the Wayback Machine! AKA The Internet Archive. In the past, we've used the Wayback to research 'ancient' history (2001 - 2006). There are a good number of reports and news articles that have been preserved in their original condition. I'd be willing to bet it's how Liaraen recovered those RTQ News items that can now be found in the RTQ Archive on the main website. At least, these articles can be found with the Wayback. So, instead of having the chronology links point to the original topics on the forums, they should point to the archives on the Wayback, whenever possible. It's just much safer. Plus, the pages are preserved exactly as they appeared on the day they were saved. So yes, the pictures are copied to the Wayback, so they are still available even if someone deletes their photobucket account, which would otherwise result in the disappearance of plenty of useful screenshots. Of course, we'll have to create those archives ourselves for all the topics. The process must be done for each page of a topic. As an example, I archived all 27 pages of Brigand Activity. You can find them here. Now, it may come to pass that we need to update an archived page. Maybe it was originally archived years ago, and the page has since changed. Strangely enough, getting the Wayback to re-archive a page is not as…simple. It's easy enough to add a page not yet on the Wayback: you type in the URL, and it gets archived. However, if the page has already been archived, it will not be saved again if you just type in the URL. So, to force the Wayback to re-archive a page, you have to fiddle with the URL. Normally, the URL of an archived page on the Wayback looks something like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20140705032916/http://www.oberin.com/ The numbers represent the date and time of a specific archive of the page identified by the following URL. In order to force a page to be saved again, replace all those numbers and the /web/ part with the word 'save'. https://web.archive.org/save/http://www.oberin.com/ So there you have it. Admittedly, I don't yet want to get started on this, since there are some topics currently missing from the forums. Basically, if there was an apostrophe in the topic title, then it didn't get transferred over properly. See "A Pirate's Life for Razan" as an example. Or rather, fail to see. Anyways, Ariki's working on that. For the time being, I am more than content to spruce up the content from 425-427. 428 is split between two forums (2005-2006 and 2007-2014), so there will be a little of that as well, mostly as it relates to the Eye storyline. Category:Blog posts